Fossil Revival

Edit Locked

Advertisement:

So there's some creature long extinct, but there are fossils of it. Well, to twist an old saying, where there's a fossil, there's a way...a way to bring it Back from the Dead with a dose of Applied Phlebotinum.

Realistically, an actual fossil is nothing more than lithified remains, and little if any actual genetic material will have survived. note Not to mention that most fossil displays are actually just plaster with wire supports. Sometimes the writers attempt to bypass this, by having said remains preserved in ice or amber. While this wouldn't work for most prehistoric animals due to DNA decaying over time, it's more plausible to the audience, so it gets a pass. Of course, when dealing with more fantastic ways of bringing fossils to life, these objections don't really matter.

Advertisement:

Examples:

open/close all folders

Comic Books

2000 AD had a dinosaur park created from DNA cloned from fossils (note this comic was published twelve years before Jurassic Park was written). Judge Dredd runs into "Satunus", a particularly vicious T. rex that had escaped from the park, in several adventures.

Spider-Man: In one issue, Stegron invents a ray that allows him to transform dinosaur fossils in museums into living dinosaurs, which he then uses to rampage through New York.

InTragg and the Sky Gods #9, Tragg battles a Necromancer called Ostellon, Master of the Living Bones who has been empowered by the Dark Gods. Ostellon reanimates an tyrannosaurus skeleton to attack Tragg.

Comic Strips

Modesty Blaise: The "The Return of the Mammoth" arc involves a plan by Soviet scientists to fertilise eggs taken from a frozen mammoth and carry them to term inside an African elephant. This is actually Ripped from the Headlines, although it's being done by American scientists and it's being held back by their inability to find a suitable frozen mammoth.

Vigil: The quarians were driven extinct by the Ethereals long in the past, and in the present the geth want humanity to to help them revive the quarian species from genetic material they recovered from their bodies.

Blindsight: Vampires went extinct around the time that humanity discovered architecture, as they have fatal seizures when they see right angles due to these screwing with their advanced pattern-finding instincts. By the mid-21st century, a biomedical corporation reconstructs their genome for their superior mathematical and hibernation abilities.

The Dresden Files: In Dead Beat, Harry revives Sue, the Tyrannosaurs rex skeleton in the Field Museum of Chicago. It's straightforward necromancy (although Sue certainly looks and acts alive enough, complete with her old instincts and reflexes) and the effects ultimately temporary, but that it works on a long-petrified dinosaur skeleton instead of a more "regular" corpse at all puts it under this trope. However, by the nature of the Dresden-verse rules, the longer something has been dead the stronger its is when raised — and Sue has been dead a very, very long time. Also conveniently, as Sue wasn't once a person, this is a perfectly legal usage of magic.

In "The Eternal Wall", by Raymond Z. Gallun, a million years in the future prairie dogscientist Loy Chuk discovers the remains of Ned Vince, a man from the 20th century, who has drowned in an alkaline lake and been subsequently buried in sediments, leaving a petrified corpse. Loy Chuk's advanced technology is able to restore Ned on a molecular level, bringing him back to life.

In Existence, chimeric neanderthals become one of five recognized varieties of human. In the very end it's said that some of the Emissaries were enticed to cooperate with the new Artifact plan by offering to resurrect their species using salvaged alien technology that could create cells from scratch.

In "Founding Fathers" by Stephen Dedman, set on a newly-colonized planet, it's mentioned in passing that the animals the colonists brought with them as frozen embryos include not only the obvious things like cattle and deer but also mammoths and passenger pigeons.

The Godwhale by T. J. Bass has people on future Earth thinking about restoring extinct ocean life — they have the technology, it's just that restoring the complete self-sustaining system is a problem. They also try to restore another extinct and dangerous life form — a modern day human — in order to battle other similar creatures threatening them. In order for it to stay loyal, they create it without the ability to synthesize certain amino acids. That was sixteen years before Crichton.

''Manifold: Space: One of the Gaijin's experiments following their arrival on Earth is the revival of extinct animals.

In Mirabile, it's mentioned that geneticists back on Earth were having some success in reconstructing extinct species, and a few were included with the plants and animals the colonists took to Mirabile. In one scene, members of the Australian Guild celebrate the imminent resurrection of the thylacine.

A Song of Ice and Fire: At the series' start, dragons are extinct and all that remains are some fossilized eggs. By the end of the first book, that's no longer true, as Daenerys has managed to revive three fossilized eggs and hatch them into baby dragons.

Steel Beach: Brontosaurs have been revived to serve as food animals on the Moon.

Thursday Next: Advanced genetic technology has been used to resurrect numerous extinct species; according to Thursday, there was a fad for reconstructed pets a while before the series' start.

Neanderthals are the most socially impactful of the resurrected species, and are generally treated almost — but not quite — as people like modern humans. The use of Homo sapiens DNA to fill in a missing gap in their genome is a plot point later.

Dodos and thylacines are fairly common pets, and mammoth migrations a periodic nuisance. Stellers' sea cows are mentioned as well.

Tabletop Games

Call of Cthulhu: In the second book of the Spawn of Azathoth adventure, the spell "Call Children of Atlach-Nacha" can be used to return spider fossils to life.

Deadlands: The Walking Fossil is a monster in the form of an animated stone skeleton of a dinosaur.

Dungeons & Dragons: A supplement for 3rd Edition includes a template for animated skeletons created from fossils rather than recently-dead bones.

Magic: The Gathering has Project Riptide, where some scientists found fossils of the Sliver race and decided to bring them back and study them. It goes horribly wrong when the Slivers multiply out of control and break out of containment, overrunning the island and killing almost everybody.

Mass Effect 3 has you search for fossils to resurrect a once dead dinosaur species called the Kakliosaur. Shepard even says s/he found the fossil encased in amber.

Nanosaur is about genetically engineered sapient raptors from the 41st century going back in time to retrieve dinosaur eggs.

Parasite Eve: Some sort of semi-sentient organic goo-thing, resulting from an accidental Assimilation Plot, disappears into the New York Museum of History. Apparently deciding that dinosaurs are awesome, it then flows across the exhibited skeletons and revives them as entirely fleshy — and quite aggressive — dinosaurs.

Nearly every generation of the main series has a place where players could take their fossils to be revived as Pokémon. The resulting Pokémon are also almost always part-Rock type (with the exception of Cranidos and its evolution Rampardos, which are purely Rock type). The Pokédex entries for Tyrantrum and Mega Aerodactyl also reveal that the revival process is imperfect and that the resurrected Pokémon don't necessarily look the same as they did in prehistoric times.

Genesect was revived from a fossil by Team Plasma, who also turned it into a cyborg, making it a Steel-type rather than a Rock type.

The fossils in the Galar Region are very imperfectly revived and are created from two different fossils each, leading to horrifying Mix-and-Match Critters with obvious defects. As a first, none of them are part Rock-type.

In Ratchet & Clank: All 4 One, Dr. Nefarious had Lawarence reanimate the Light-Eating Zegrute on display in the middle of the city.

Resident Evil 4: Las Plagas are revealed to be prehistoric, and were recovered from fossils in an excavation underneath the castle. God knows how old they really were.

Spectrobes has the titular creatures being revived in this fashion. However, their "fossils" are less traditional fossils and more stone statues in their shapes, making them more of a kind of Sealed Good in a Can.

World of Warcraft, thanks to the archaeology profession released in the Cataclysm expansion, allows players to find raptor fossils and rebuild them into a moving mount and pet.

Zoo Tycoon 2: The Extinct Animals expansion pack lets the player find fossils and clone a baby dino/extinct animal from it. If the player gets a 100% on the minigame required to clone the critter, the baby becomes a Super Clone, which is bigger, lives longer, and won't get sick.

Webcomics

Fellowship Of Heroes: A "Dr. Yesterday" cloned dinosaurs in sufficient numbers that a couple of states had to be evacuated. Texas domesticated them however, resulting in mammoth steaks and brachiosaur rodeos.

SCP Foundation: SCP-250 is one of the few that doesn't require particularly stringent safety protocols, because it's an animated Allosaurus skeleton that behaves like, well, a large predatory carnosaur. It even eats things, though as soon as they fall though its nonexistent throat it loses interest in them, considering them eaten.

The Penguins of Madagascar: Kowalski creates a cloning machine he plans to use to revive an extinct penguin with a feather sample from a specimen in the Museum of Natural History. Unfortunately, the mission goes wrong and they clone a dodo instead, who turns out to be suicidally reckless, so they have to clone him again... and again, and again, and again.

The Super Globetrotters: One episodes features Museum Man, who has a device that turns dinosaur skeletons back into live dinosaurs.

There is a lot of talk about doing this for some extinct animals such as mammoths, but only a few extinct species are theoretically capable of being brought back with existing technology — as DNA is an extremely fragile molecule and decays very quickly, only very recently extinct creatures or ones preserved in unusual conditions (such as in Siberian permafrost) can yield intact genetic material.

The extinct Pyrenean ibex was the first — and so far only — animal resurrected by cloning, although it died from lung problems seven minutes after birth. In this case, however, the genetic material came from tissue samples taken from the last Pyrenean ibex when it was still alive. Currently, a team of Australian scientists is likewise attempting to revive the gastric-brooding frog.

Realistically speaking, there's no chance of getting genetic material for something as long-extinct as a non-avian dinosaur — there's simply no way for DNA to survive for the 65 million or more years since their extinction even in ideal conditions, let alone the process of fossilization. So sorry no T. rex that way, however it is theoretically possible to genetically reverse engineer a T. rex from say a chicken.

Community

Tropes HQ

TVTropes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available from thestaff@tvtropes.org. Privacy Policy